Snapshot decisions: Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Polaroids

DiCorcia's current exhibition, Roid, illuminates his cerebral decision-making and the instinctive ebb and flow of his art

Philip-Lorca diCorcia used hidden strobe lighting and a long-range lens to capture unwitting passers-by in Times Square, New York (Untitled, n.d., Polaroid).
Photograph: Courtesy the artist, Sprüth Magers Berlin London and David Zwirner /Philip-Lorca diCorcia

I have always considered Philip-Lorca diCorcia one of the great postmodernists of contemporary photography. Having received an MA in Fine Arts Photography at Yale in 1979, his reputation rests to a great degree on his moody and meticulous restaging of scenes from everyday life. Initially, he photographed close friends and family members in low-key, intimate situations that often look both real and strangely heightened, like stills from one of Gus Van Sant's dreamier films.

DiCorcia's meticulous-to-the-point-of-obsessive preparation was evident from the start. He once fixed a flash bulb to the inside of a fridge that was triggered by the door being opened. He photographed his brother looking into the fridge over and over again until he created the most "real" approximation of that "casual" moment. The result plays with our perception of the photograph not just as a signifier of reality, but as a place to which we bring a whole host of preconceptions and expectations. Mood or atmosphere is important in all of DiCorcia's images as it is, in very different ways, in the work of, say, William Eggleston or Rinko Kawauchi. One is always tempted to trace a narrative in, and beyond, a DiCorcia image: is the man opening the fridge living in poverty or is he just hungry? Perhaps he is stoned, or simply bored.

That sense of a bigger created narrative hovers over all of DiCorcia's photographs. For his Hustlers series, made in the early 1990s, he posed real-life rent boys in locations he had chosen around Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. These images look oddly innocent and day-dreamy, but make you wonder about identity – both what his subjects are projecting in terms of their personas and what the photographer is projecting on to them. The illusion of innocence was contradicted by his decision to include in the title captions the amount he had paid them for their time – $20-$50. He too was renting their bodies, albeit for art.

DiCorcia also helped redefine the parameters of street photography with his Heads series (2000), deploying a complex strategy that ran contrary to the genre's traditional hit-and-run approach. He rigged a strobe light system to scaffolding on Times Square in New York that was triggered by unwitting passers-by, whom DiCorcia then photographed by long lens from a vantage point nearby. The results were a series of head-shot portraits that dispensed with the surroundings altogether – street photography without the street – but allowed us to witness first-hand the strange reveries of passers-by even on the most crowded streets. Again, the images, exhibited as huge, high resolution digital scans, held the heightened reality of film stills and an almost transgressive sense of intimacy. (One of his subjects, Ermo Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew, famously went to court against DiCorcia arguing that his privacy and religious rights had been breached. The judge ruled in favour of DiCorcia, concluding that the photograph was art and thus protected by the first amendment.)

It is intriguing then to see DiCorcia's current show, Roid, at Sprüth Magers gallery in London. Here, the master of high-end conceptual photography is displaying a selection of his humble Polaroids, just over 100 in all, arranged in a single line around the gallery walls. The show is akin to a smaller version of his 2007 book, Thousand, a compilation of 1,000 real-size reproductions of Polaroids (selected from over 4,000), many of which were taken as part of the preparatory process for the projects mentioned above. Like many photographers, DiCorcia often uses an instant Polaroid print to check lighting levels or composition before shooting on regular film. Sometimes the Polaroids are akin to diary entries, glimpses of ideas or images to come, a record of a moment, a scene or an event. Many are familiar from finished works, while others are startling in their capturing of intimacy or their ambition – a towering concrete flyover, a woman reflected several times in a mirrored door, a monochrome landscape of defoliated trees against a bleak hill. All of them reveal DiCorcia's instinct for a great shot.

"As you get older, you trust your instincts a lot more," DiCorcia noted, back in 2007, when Thousand was published. "Often the reason you did it is so simple and basic that it's almost invisible, and to point that out does not reduce the complexity of the situation, but it makes you think about decision-making rather then feel the emotional and psychological ebb and flow that is the point of it."

DiCorcia's Polaroids are not as dramatically powerful or intellectually challenging as his bigger works, but they cast light on his intensely cerebral decision-making and the instinctive ebb and flow of his art. And, as artefacts, they possess a singular beauty in and of themselves; a beauty peculiar to the Polaroid, that great signifier of transience, memory and intimacy.

Now see this

Two shows that evince a strong sense of place. John Bulmer's great, gritty street scenes from the north of England in the 1960s and 1970s are at the Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff until 12 June. Almost from a different planet are Vicky Wetherill's detached, but revealing, observations of the enclosed and unreal world of Las Vegas casinos. An Edge Against the House is at Lucy Bell Fine Art, St Leonards on Sea, until 11 June.